Help please! Screwed Up Hybrid MBR

Posted 14 January 2013 - 08:30 AM

Okay, So I had made an hybrid MBR and installed Mac on the first and Windows on the second partition.

After sometime, i started having problems with mac, so i overwrote that partition with the latest version of windows 8 beta.

Now when i finally got another hard drive, I installed lion on that. Everything was fine till then.Whenever i booted up mac, it kept showing me disc not recognised ( the hybrid MBR disk) so i did the biggest mistake of my life by clicking repair And then poof ! everything was gone. I've tried lots of tools to recover my partitions ( there were 3 totally) but failed!

Then I came across this awesome piece of software called gdisk (GPT-fdisk). But i'm unsure how to use it properly.

Posted 14 January 2013 - 06:54 PM

Having never used this tool, I'm not sure how much help I can be, but here are some questions that may guide you in the right place.

Do you have a system/motherboard that has UEFI? This program does not support MBR... sort of. It looks like you do have GPT from what you described above, but I am unsure of the MBR hybrid part and what that means.

If you have UEFI, you can use this to change your partitions from MBR to GUID without a loss of data. Do you have any working system available? If you do, download this.

If you don't have another system... have you thought about getting (yet) another hard drive and installing a working OS to it? A lot of people suggest running Windows and OSX on separate HDD, not just separate partitions. I know money is always an issue, but I believe this is a good idea. The main part of that is if you screw up something in a boot table, you can always take the 'other' HDD out and fix the boot record easily (easier at least) to get up and running quickly.

I found a very good tutorial on this program located here. And now that I think about it, you at least have access to another computer, otherwise you wouldn't be posting here! *smacks hand on forehead* Take a little bit of time to read thru the sections and I imagine you'll get the system running - assuming that you have a system that is either GPT or GPT compatible.

One more question... can you get into your Windows 8 beta partition or are you completely locked out? If you can boot to your Windows 8 partition, at the very worst, you could access the data on the OSX partition and copy your music and images off of the partition before you wipe it and start over. Dont know how to access a Mac from windows? go here.

Posted 14 January 2013 - 08:44 PM

Well, it is a little urgent when you stand to lose the whole of your music/ image collection .

That risk is always there when you install unsupported operating systems and when you use unknown tools, especially without making a backup before you start.

Change wasn't really required you know.

Yes it was. Your title was both against the rules and against my guidelines.

Your topic does not deserve any more attention than others seeking help hence topic titles must reflect their content, and topic titles containing things like: 'please help' 'look here' 'cash reward' 'urgent' or other inaccurate descriptions will be removed. This includes all-caps titles.

Posted 15 January 2013 - 02:29 PM

That risk is always there when you install unsupported operating systems and when you use unknown tools, especially without making a backup before you start.

Yes it was. Your title was both against the rules and against my guidelines.

I'm sorry if it was! I am really new to this forum.

Do you have a system/motherboard that has UEFI? This program does not support MBR... sort of. It looks like you do have GPT from what you described above, but I am unsure of the MBR hybrid part and what that means.

If you have UEFI, you can use this to change your partitions from MBR to GUID without a loss of data. Do you have any working system available? If you do, download this.

I do not think i have UEFI, My motherboard's DG31PR, its quite old.

Also, mac boots up perfectly fine ( which is on my 2nd HDD) and i can't find any good free programs that support recovering data . Photorec recovers data but it dumps all files in a single folder(includeing system files) ! That was good as not having anything!!

My windows partition does show up when i boot up using a linux live cd, but it shows its already present!! I guess the MBR is screwed so it won't boot. And i don't know how to fix mbr through Linux/Mac

I did read this tutorial, even mailed Rod, but couldn't figure out what to do safely. Can i write a new partition table using gdisk or will that spoil everything?

P.S. I only need to make my windows work ! i dont care about anything else!!

As far as I know - since i haven't experimented with Windows 8 - since it would not have been factory installed, the recovery methoud for Windows would be the same - insert a Windows install CD (or make a recovery CD from someone else's machine if you have no install media), follow the on screen instructions until you get to the option to repair. I embedded a video below that I found on YouTube that will walk you thru the process.

This will make any other OS non-bootable - so make sure this is what you want to do first.